Memoir Of A Snail (2024): The Best Stop-Motion Film Since Coraline – Yes, Really

For as much as several stop-motion films are among my favourite films of all time, I always have to pinch myself whenever I get to see a new one. I’m still by no means a connoisseur of the medium but damn if I don’t treasure the opportunity to see people deciding to tell stories through sculpting clay rather than digital rendering. Memoir Of A Snail’s writer and director Adam Elliot is clearly proud of that point – in a pre-recorded intro before the screening I attended, he describes that the production process for the film took eight years but did not involve any CG whatsoever. He also hopes that we’d laugh and cry. Well, Mr Elliott, I did both of the above as well as a few more. Memoir of A Snail is absolutely tremendous and with any luck should rank as one of the best stop-motion films ever.

It takes a lot for me to say something like this, given how much I hold Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas dearly to my heart, but you wouldn’t know Memoir of A Snail was only Adam Elliot’s second feature film as this has all the hallmarks of a man who’s been making features for decades and has his craft honed down to a fine art. 

Whenever anyone praises the art of stop-motion they begin to sound like a broken record but it’s often overlooked just how much each individual uses the medium to craft their own visual style. Fantastic Mr Fox looks nothing like The Nightmare Before Christmas which looks nothing like The Boxtrolls. Each stop-motion film always has as least a certain element of macabre to it – it’s only natural with a form of animation that unnatural. Even going by that rule though, Memoir of A Snail is distinctly freakish in just about every little detail and I love it. The way that each and every environment we see in the film, whether naturalistic or manmade, looks macabre and distorted, each building on the streets looking like they’ve been abandoned for years even though they’re all still in use. 

Sometimes in stop-motion it can be fairly obvious that this inherent weirdness is being shown through the perspective of the protagonist, who doesn’t see the world in a normal way and is frightened by the things around them. Coraline is perhaps the film that alludes to that most directly – the less sure Coraline becomes about the Other World, the scarier and nastier it appears. Memoir of A Snail follows the character of Grace Pudel from a little girl to an adult, and it’s immediately obvious that she is not a normal person and she is not living in a normal world. She sees characters such as her father and Pinky, an old woman she befriends, as weird but wonderful people and as a result the audience gets to experience them in the same light. 

At the same time, there’s a lot of darkness within this and let me just say, Memoir of A Snail succeeds spectacularly at creating characters that are utterly loathsome without even giving them much dialogue. Grace’s brother Gilbert faces a harsh and terrifying life with a bizarre family of crazy Christian fundamentalists (think Margaret White in Carrie only she’s plasticine), and Elliot strikes the perfect balance of the terrifying and the absurd: they speak nonsensical gibberish half of the time, which could also be Gilbert’s naivety and inability to understanding what they speak of, but the music and the animation combine to make them appear genuinely scary and mad. My mouth was hanging open a number of times during this subplot as Elliot kept pushing Gilbert’s story in more disturbing and shocking directions, and I was fully invested emotionally in what was going on. This film’s ability to be set in such a warped imagined world and still hit incredibly hard is truly astounding. 

It’s about time to mention that I haven’t yet seen Adam Elliot’s critically-acclaimed 2009 debut Mary and Max, though it has been on my list for some time and after seeing Memoir of A Snail I’m endeavouring to see it as soon as I can. Maybe the tone of this film impressed me even more as I’m not already aware of his style, but as I alluded to earlier you wouldn’t believe this was only a second film. There is so much confidence in Memoir of A Snail, and its lengthy production cycle has not led to a compromised vision, which is normally the end result of a long development period. It’s led to a fully-formed, intricately-crafted and well-rounded story that has given attention to every single aspect of its world and its characters. 

Grace is an amazing protagonist, and we constantly feel for her through every high and low. She encounters many emotional and psychological roadblocks, but it never felt like a pity party and each new experience Grace had, whether inspiring hope in her or saddling her with grief and trauma, felt real, earned and important. The film’s themes all coalesce by its conclusion, in one of the very best speeches about life I’ve ever heard. 

I’m paraphrasing here, but the film makes the excellent point that “the worst cages are the ones we make for ourselves.” If you hide yourself away after every terrible and traumatic thing that may happen to you, then the less chance you have of fully mentally recovering from them. With that entire speech, Elliot takes a simple, overdone sentiment and makes it into a gut-punch. I am not afraid to admit that I shed a few tears during this final sequence, and it’s not an easy task to make me cry. 

Again, there is not one stereotypical normal person in Memoir of A Snail. There’s quirks and eccentricities, both positive and negative, in everyone. We learn about the livelihoods and habits of everyone that Grace meets, and Adam Elliot showcases his dark and subversive sense of humor. It’s rare to see an animated film with a 15 rating, but this film proves it’s not just a novelty. For every hilariously dark bit of comedy (including one moment which is the hardest I’ve laughed in ages), there’s explorations of depression, disturbing secrets about those Grace trusts, and queer identity coming under homophobic religious backlash in the darkest moment of the entire film and the darkest thing I have ever seen in stop-motion. The exploration and presentation of these heart-wrenching concepts cuts through any potential inaccessibility from the film’s unusual nature, ensuring that Memoir of A Snail will stay with me for a long, long time. 

I’m trying my best not to spoil any of the plot, as the film is absolutely brimming with little details and elements that shouldn’t be revealed in a review. Whenever anyone describes a film as an ‘experience,’ they run the risk of sounding like a pretentious prick but that’s honestly the best way I can describe watching Memoir of A Snail. It was an experience. I was laughing, crying, gasping in shock for all of the runtime and I can say the same for every other person in that screening. Sitting in Tyneside Cinema (shoutout to you guys, you’re awesome) watching a dark bit of stop-motion is my idea of heaven and when the lights came on at the end, I saw a man turn to his partner and say – “What a bloody film.” 

Dude, I agree entirely. What a bloody film this is. This is dark, deep, rich and immersive storytelling that manages to feel both cuttingly real and vividly imaginative while being presented in the most gorgeous and meticulous of ways. It may have took 8 years for Adam Elliot to make Memoir of A Snail, but if his next film is as good as this I’ll happily wait just as long. We may only be two months into 2025, but I may have just found my film of the year (assuming Laika’s long-awaited return with Wildwood doesn’t wallop me). 

Alex’s Archive – Memoir of a Snail (2024)